Imatges de pàgina
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more readily, that I have met with some very troublesome proofs that a man may be too celebrated for a peaceable disposition. A somewhat amusing one occurred lately. A fellow was accustomed to have his asses feeding at my hay-stack all night. I told him one morning, that I was going to send the bell-man through the town to give notice, that any asses found there for the future, would be shot. The rascal grinned in my face, and told me I had better save my sixpence. "Why, fellow ?" said I. "Why," replied he, "why, Sir, because if you should call it fifty times through the town, that you would do a poor man an injury, nobody would believe you." I find it quite necessary, therefore, to adopt, for a time at least, my country's motto, Nemo me impune lacesset. Besides, the attack of ANGLICANUS is too feeble to put me in much danger of getting very angry; and a reply to it,—such a reply as it deserves,-may dissipate a little of my "cynical discontent," by affording me a few hours amusement in these holiday times.

But instead of going directly to the passage in which I am more immediately concerned, it will be proper to take a general view of the Pamphlet, and of the character of our accuser. The letters are written by ANGLICANUS, that is, by an Englishman. This the writer professes to be, and though he does not say, leads his readers to infer, that he is an Englishman of no common rank, either in the civil or religious world. Whether, previous to his visit to Scotland, he had pushed his geographical studies to such a superfluous extent, as to know of the existence of such a place as Edinburgh, does not appear. He had never been so idle at least, as to trouble himself with inquiring what was going on there. He is accordingly quite surprised on arriving in that city, to learn that the Apocrypha controversy is still kept up there, after it has been not only settled in England, but so completely forgotten, and considered so utterly insignificant, that in the society in which he has been accustomed to move, nothing could be deemed more impertinent,-nothing more effectually set the company a yawning, than any allusion to so antiquated a piece of history. He accordingly takes up the subject in a very

lofty and dignified style-so lofty, indeed, as not to be always perfectly comprehensible by so Plebeian an understanding as mine-and politely condescends to notice Scottish affairs, with the good-natured civility of a man who kindly enters into the concerns of a group of children, smiling the while with a complacent consciousness of his own superiority to the trifles that he permits for a moment to occupy his attention. Nay, even at the hazard of losing caste in the simple fraternity to which he belongs, should he be detected in the " inexpiable offence" of meddling with the Apocrypha controversy, he takes the trouble-how very affable and obliging!-to let the people of Scotland know how far they are out of the way, and undertakes to set them right. He never dreams of course, that people so far beneath his notice, and whom he has nevertheless condescended to honour with his presence and his instructions, should be guilty of aught so monstrous, as to question the soundness of the views communicated to them, by the polite and well-informed stranger.

This is the assumed character. It is not every one, however, and least of all, one writing under the influence of strong passion, that is able to sustain an assumed character; and in the case of ANGLICANUS, the assumed and the real characters are ever and anon exhibiting themselves in the most ludicrous contrast. Through the affected disguise, the writer permits to appear, in almost every page, the bitterness of a wrath that will not be repressed. Wherever mention occurs of any of the religious institutions of Scotland, or whenever his path is crossed, as it often is, by that most pestiferous of mortal men, Dr THOMSON, away fly the stilts,off goes the mask,-and the high-born, high-bred, calm and dignified Englishman, is at once metamorphosed into a plain Scottish termagant, giving vent to all the exasperation of female rage, in all the incoherence of female railing.

ANGLICANUS! Forsooth. When next this gentle railer condescends to dip her fair fingers in ink, and wants a designation at once high-sounding and appropriate, let her write, and write boldly,-NOVIPORTANA. Nobody will then suspect her of writing under a borrowed character, for amply and

ably has she vindicated her claim to the title. An Englishman! Indeed, and a calm and dignified Englishman too! This will not pass. The disguise is too thin-too often and too openly thrown aside to deceive the most careless reader. Every person will at once see that no Englishman,no man did write, or could write the letters of ANGLICANUS. The impress of a female hand is indelibly stamped upon its pages. Who, among Edinburgh's ten thousand respectable matrons, or her twice ten thousand daughters of beauty, has been so far forsaken of common sense, and of a sense of all the deli→ cacies and proprieties of her sex, as to be guilty of such an infliction upon the world's patience, it boots not me to inquire. She is evidently one who is actuated by the bitterest personal hatred to Dr THOMSON, but who at the same time so pants for notoriety, that she is willing to purchase it, even at the expense of being by him scourged into public notice; and she probably will not be disappointed. She announces herself, however, as of the masculine gender, and as such, after this protest against the reality of the character, I shall speak of her.

But this instructive title-page is yet rich in matter. It contains a motto, and that motto contains a very candid confession, that the writer has been bit.

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Whose bite hath pinch'd and pain'd me to the proof."

Now, that the writer has been bit, is obvious enough, even though he had not confessed it. He has been driven to his pen by the influence of a sort of Scotophobia, which rendered seven copious evacuations necessary, in order to avoid more fatal consequences. But, then, who has been guilty of biting this gentle Englishman into such a rabid state? The general strain of the Pamphlet would lead us to refer this motto to Dr THOMSON, and the Letters certainly afford at least one strong proof in support of the idea, that he is the biter. The person bit generally attempts to imitate the animal that bit him; and in these Letters there are not a few attempts at

imitating the Doctor's style of reasoning,-as awkward, indeed, as imitations springing from such a source, may naturally be expected to be, yet, at the same time, so very palpable, as to place the Doctor's own sanity in a very questionable situation, unless he can free himself of the charge, of having inflicted so lamentable an injury upon the mild constitution of ANGLICANUS.

The Doctor may indeed allege that ANGLICANUS has not been bit at all, since the disease produced by biting commonly exhibits itself in the exhausting exertion of preternatural strength, and his own bite particularly, whatever other effect it might have had, might have been expected to communicate some force at least, yet the waywardness of infancy is not more feeble than the strugglings of ANGLICANUS. And the Doctor may farther prove his own innocence, from the facts announced by ANGLICANUS himself, that that gentleman had lived in a situation by far too elevated for the Doctor to reach, where the mutterings of his thunder, if heard at all, could send only a hardly audible reverberation from below,-that the Doctor is not known South of the Tyne, and consequently could not be known to ANGLICANUS, who was ignorant of even the existence of the controversy up to the 9th of July, and the first explosion of his wrath is dated on the 12th of the same month.

It would seem, however, from many passages in the Letters, that the writer has really been exceedingly galled by the Doctor's writings, and in the preface he says, "The offence," that is, of abusing people by name, " is against one who will reck far less our just reproofs, than we have his pitiless, unmerited reproaches." So, then, ANGLICANUS has both heard and deeply felt these reproaches after all. He indeed says, a few lines below, "We neither deprecate his wrath, nor desire his forbearance. His utmost ire, and means of giving effect to it,Nought value we nor shun.'" These two passages exhibit something very like a contradiction. I should suppose that ANGLICANUS either was, or was not galled by Dr THOMSON'S reproaches. However, he says he neither was, nor was not, and he doubtless knows best. Moreover, though I dare say the Doctor will value the reproofs of such a re

prover at a very low rate, yet how he is to value them "far less" than nothing, I am not acute enough to see. But these are trifles to ANGLICANUS.

As he has collected, out of a long passage of the Odyssey, a few lines to tell the world why he was induced to oblige it by this "proof" of the strength of his powers, I wonder that he did not look a little farther down, where he would have found some verses, with which he might have properly closed his labours, shewing how triumphant that "proof" had proved to be. As he was no doubt prevented by his modesty from doing himself this justice, I beg leave to enact the part of Pallas on the occasion, and subjoin the verses:

Και κ' αλαος τοι, ξεινε διακρίνεις το σημα
Αμφαφοων· ἐπει οὔτι μεμιγμένον εστιν ὁμιλω,
Αλλα πολυ πρωτον· συ δε θάρσει τον δε γ' αεθλον
Οὐτις Φαιήκων τονγ' ίξεται, ουδ' ὑπερησει.

And as I am not in possession of his Translation, I beg his acceptance of mine, warm from a brain hitherto unpolluted with the sin of rhyme. Such are the wonder-working powers of these Letters, that the mere reading of them has made even me, not poetical indeed, for a poet of Scotland's breeding would be a lusus beyond aught that nature in her wildest freaks has yet produced, but metrical, and that, I suppose, is as near an approach to poetry as any Scot, Sir Walter himself not excepted, ought to pretend to. As the inspiration is wholly his own, he is richly entitled to the first fruits of it, and well does his Pamphlet deserve to be concluded in such strains as these:

At last the contest's done, for even the blind may see,
How vain it were to seek a man to equal thee;
Joy in thy matchless might; bid boldest Scots draw near,
Thy matchless might to meet, the boldest Scot will fear.

Let this I pray be attended to in the second, and all subsequent editions of these Letters, that the writer's fame may not fall a sacrifice to his modesty.

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